The Royal York, one of Toronto's finest, undergoes 'transformation' in tribute to its 90th year

When it opened to the public on the 11th of June, 1929, it was touted as 'the largest building in the British Commonwealth,' a title boasted on every advertisement and flyer it ran for years

Calum Marsh

Updated: August 14, 2019

Standing 28 storeys and outfitted with more than a thousand individual rooms, the hotel was their masterpiece, a colossus of luxury — an institution without rival in Toronto for decades. Courtesy of Fairmont Royal York

A city’s great hotels are more symbolic than its other buildings, richer in significance and meaning — more like landmarks, really, than mere places to stay. Hotels welcome new arrivals, and the temperature of the greeting creates the earliest impressions of a location, setting the mood for an entire visit and helping to determine its reputation in memory long after.

There are, of course, a range of accommodations available to the informed traveller, from economy flophouses to boutique suites; lately one can even rent a night or two in a local’s home. But major cities will always have great hotels, and the great hotels, the palaces through whose halls history itself has seemed to pass, remain incomparable. The impression they make is immediate. They radiate something indefinable from the street.

On Front Street, before Union Station in Toronto, stands a huge, extravagant building, erected almost a century ago as a kind of introduction to the city for thousands arriving each day by train. From the beginning, it was intended to raise the standard for new world hospitality, and its exquisite exterior remains a marvel of 1920s design — an Art Deco palace in Indiana limestone, capped with a copper chateau roof and finished with travertine pillars and crystal chandeliers.

Inside are 1373 guest rooms. There are 36 rooms for meetings and functions, some of which can accommodate more than 1600 visitors. A lavish VIP boardroom serves frequently as a set for Hollywood films. On the second floor there is a health club and a swimming pool. On the 14th floor, there is a garden where vegetables are grown for use in the hotel’s restaurants, and there’s also an apiary, not accessible to guests, from whose hives are harvested 450 pounds of honey each year. The “bee hotel” is home to 350,000 honeybees at the peak of summer. A little of their honey may be tasted in the Gold Lounge, drizzled over wedges of creamy brie.

This is the Royal York.

It was constructed through the mid-1920s, part of an ambitious plan by the Canadian Pacific Railway to build a number of large hotels along its national train line. There were Quebec’s Château Montebello and Château Frontenac, the Chateau Lake Louise and Banff Springs in Alberta and The Empress Hotel in Victoria to name a few. Remarkable buildings, all of them, standing out — unmistakable, unmissable — wherever they were built. The CPR understood the power of this kind of hotel, the almost talismanic quality they could have. It was to be an empire of prodigal splendour, no expense spared.

The Royal York was to be the CPR’s crown jewel. When it opened to the public on the 11th of June, 1929, it was touted as “the largest building in the British Commonwealth,” a title boasted on every advertisement and flyer it ran for years. Standing 28 storeys and outfitted with more than a thousand individual rooms, the hotel was their masterpiece, a colossus of luxury — an institution without rival in Toronto for decades.

It seemed to have everything — and to represent everything, on the frontier of the new world. It had a roof garden enclosed in glass and a bank and golf course on the premises. Its kitchen, the largest in the country, baked 15,000 French rolls daily, and its library, curated by Toronto’s chief librarian George Locke, held over 12,000 books. It had a hospital and a silversmith and a pipe organ. It cost more than $16 million — the equivalent of $242 million today — and seemed, to the city and country proud of it, priceless.

The romance is alluring for many. Writers, especially, seem drawn to hotels, and stories of authors taking up residence in hotels are often more famous than the buildings that housed them. Nabokov lived for 17 years at the Montreux Palace in Switzerland, along Lake Geneva. Hemingway spent seven years at Cuba’s Hotel Ambos Mundos. Noel Coward had the Cathay; Joseph Conrad, the Mandarin Oriental; Thomas Mann the Hotel Des Bains, on the Lido, where Death in Venice was born.

Arthur Hailey was never held in such esteem as Nabokov or Hemingway. The British-Canadian writer, author of several popular novels and Hollywood screenplays, is best remembered today for an airborne potboiler he penned in the 1950s, Flight Into Danger, which was adapted as the Dana Andrews thriller Zero Hour! and, decades later, was the basis for Airplane!, a parody of the film.

TORONTO, ONTARIO: JUNE 14, 2019—HOSPITALITY—Pedestrians walk past the Fairmont Royal York Hotel moniker on York Street at Front Street in Toronto, Friday June 14, 2019.Peter J Thompson/Financial Post

Nevertheless, Hailey moved into the Royal York in early 1962 — it would not take the name Fairmont Royal York until the turn of the century — as the hotel’s writer-in-residence, during which time he studied the hotel and the business of hotel operation extensively. “He read almost 30 books on hotel administration,” Christopher Heard writes in his book The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living, “and made a detailed survey of the hotel from top to bottom.”

From this intensive research, Hailey produced a bestseller called, simply, Hotel. The novel concerns the exploits of the staff and guests of the fictitious St. Gregory Hotel, in the French Quarter in New Orleans, and is often said to be modelled on the real-life Roosevelt Hotel in that city. Yet, as Heard points out, “every description in his book belongs to the Royal York,” his home while he wrote it.

Here is how Hailey saw the place, through the eyes of its proprietor, one of the novel’s protagonists, Warren Trent: “Whatever criticisms might be levelled nowadays at the way the St. Gregory was run, to Warren Trent it was more than a hotel; it had been his lifetime’s work. He had seen it grow from insignificance to prominence, from a modest initial building to a towering edifice occupying most of a city block. The hotel’s reputation, too, had for many years been high, its name ranking nationally with traditional hostelries like the Bitmore, or Chicago’s Palmer House or the St. Francis in San Francisco.”

As the novel opens, the St. Gregory, “for all the prestige and glamour it once enjoyed,” has in recent years “slipped behind the times.” It is a difficult period for a hotelier; trade is not as robust as it used to be, and with debts mounting, Trent fears he may have no choice but to sell to O’Keefe, an international chain looking to acquire another property. What he wishes for is an opportunity to reinvigorate the place — and to procure back some of its former glory. “New financing and a firm, controlling hand on management could work wonders,” Trent reflects, “even, perhaps, restoring the hotel to its old competitive position.”

Even 50 years ago, as Hailey observed its day-to-day affairs, the Royal York seemed somewhat antique, held over from another era and at risk, perhaps, of obsolescence amid social and commercial change. An old hotel such as the Royal York enjoys a certain charm on account of its history. It can also seem merely old, even old-fashioned — and as recently as a few years ago the time-worn suites had a mustiness not in keeping with the hotel’s still grand lobby and dazzling exterior.

This summer, the Fairmont Royal York celebrates its 90th year, and to commemorate the occasion it has undertaken major renovations, the most pressing of which were recently completed. Management refers to it as “the transformation” — a process, practically ritualistic, by which the Royal York will be reborn. A five-year effort costing hundreds of millions of dollars, the project has done already what Trent desired for the St. Gregory: The transformation has restored the long prestigious Royal York to its old competitive position, and indeed its former glory.

Some of the most conspicuous renovations impress themselves upon you as soon as you pass through the revolving Front Street doors: The clock and spiral staircase that have been the centrepieces of the lobby since their installation in 2002 and 1973 respectively have been removed, and in the middle of the room now looms a huge Art Deco clocktower, actually a cocktail bar known, fittingly, as Clockwork Champagne & Cocktails.

In the tradition of the great hotel bars, especially the world’s greatest bar, the American Bar at the Savoy in London, Clockwork takes a classical approach, with a serious cocktail program whose emphasis is on sophistication. Its signature drink, dubbed Meet Me at the Clock, is a heady combination of gin and Veuve Clicquot served in a champagne flute and misted with absinthe; in the dead centre of the glass sits what appears to be a spherical ice cube, actually a scoop of frosé.

Upstairs, on the deluxe “Fairmont Gold” floors, the new rooms are unrecognizable. When I last stayed in the hotel, in the summer of 2011, I found the rooms cramped and stale, as if untouched since the beginning of the last century. Now they are some of the most magnificent hotel rooms in the country. The changes are not only cosmetic. Reconceived, from the ground up, by the influential firm Champalimaud Design — they have worked on the Plaza and the Carlyle in New York and various Four Seasons and Waldorf Astorias worldwide — the guest rooms and suites feel like modern, stylish residences, furnished with modern amenities but decorated in a spirit appropriate to the building’s original 1920s design. When the renovations began, there were 137 rooms on the Gold floors. They knocked down the walls and expanded the real estate. They’re now down to 104, and you appreciate the extra space.

Eager to learn more about the transformation, I spoke with Edwin Frizzell, general manager of the Royal York and, almost everyone I mentioned his name to insisted, a real, honest-to-god hotelier of the old school.

Hotel management has always seemed a noble vocation, standing as a bulwark against falling standards in dire times. Talking to Frizzell confirms this suspicion. He gives you a sense of hospitality not as an industry but as an art, practiced with thought and care. He thinks of himself not as the caretaker of the Royal York, but as its “steward.” This feels plainly true. He knows the hotel’s history well. It is of this, as much as the materials or fixtures, that he is the steward. He presides over what has transpired here. What personages have roomed here, have left their mark.

Frizzell was born on Prince Edward Island, where, he says, “the spirit of hospitality is born into you.” He dreamed of working in a hotel from a young age for an amusing reason, in light of where he ended up: He was fascinated by Hotel, the primetime soap opera based on Arthur Hailey’s book. “I thought it was very glamorous, this old hotel on TV,” he remembers. “I think I must have been destined for this job, because the very reason I’m a hotelier is thanks to the building I’m now the steward of.”

In addition to the Royal York, Frizzell oversees a number of other hotels under the Fairmont brand, including the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, the Hotel MacDonald in Edmonton, the Palliser in Calgary, and the Fairmont Winnipeg, several of which were among the original hotels built along the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

It’s the Royal York, though, that most often arouses glimmers of recognition, even awe, in the people he meets abroad. “Whenever I’m travelling, when I say I work at the Royal York, literally everyone everywhere has a story about it,” he says. “It’s where their grandmother stayed half a century ago, or where they get off the train in the 1950s and got their first job.”

Of course, one does not always wish to stay at the hotel favoured by one’s grandmother. And it can be something of a struggle, for the Royal York, to honour its incredible history while at the same time moving on from the past. “This is part of the strategic discussions we’ve been having for years,” Frizzell says. “When you are operating a business with an iconic historical building, how do you not become a museum?”

Prestige came easily to the Royal York, whose designers courted it from the outset expressly. Celebrities and dignitaries stayed at the Royal York whenever they graced Toronto; artists, actors, musicians, even royalty gravitated there, as if no reasonable alternative could exist. Churchill gave a speech there soon after the hotel opened. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip stayed there, and in fact have their own room, the Royal Suite, which when they visited in 1973 was furnished with an array of china made for the occasion. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong performed at the Imperial Room, the hotel’s once famous nightclub; so did, much later, Jim Carrey, making his stage debut.

A luxury hotel will attract a distinguished clientele, and an old luxury hotel will inevitably have housed its share of luminaries. In recent years, the Royal York has had difficulty luring clients of similar distinction. The problem, as it was explained to me by Fairmont representatives, was one of changing standards of luxury. While the Royal York has continued to serve rich and famous people in its restaurants and even host junkets and press events for movie premieres in its facilities, its rooms have fallen short of the modern benchmark for five-star comfort.

The renovations, particularly on the Gold floors, are intended at least partly to address the problem. Larger and immeasurable more beautiful, the new guest rooms and suites have been brought up to the level expected of a contemporary luxury hotel.

This is why renovations pose a curious dilemma. On the one hand, the Royal York enjoys a reputation as having been one of the finest hotels in the country for more than a century; age is essential to the hotel’s appeal, and the more modern it is made to feel through redecoration and refurbishment, the less authentic it will seem as a monument to history. On the other hand, the Royal York was conceived as a world-class luxury hotel, state of the art and top of the line; as our conception of luxury evolves, it’s reasonable that the Royal York should evolve, too.

Consider the predicament in Ottawa. After Larco Investments, the owner of the Château Laurier (they lease day-to-day operations to Fairmont), received city council’s approval to build a seven-storey addition to the hotel, politicians, heritage experts and the public expressed alarm. More recently, Heritage Ottawa launched a fundraising campaign to take the city to court, hoping to halt construction before it begins.

Frizzell feels the way forward for the Royal York is “not rooted simply in history,” and that “staying relevant is important” to the way the business has to operate long-term. As renovations continue — the hotel has plans to overhaul its popular Library Bar and other parts of the building next — the challenge is to “stay true to the history of the building while also making it modern for another era.” The demands of the modern traveller must be met even as the legacy of the building is accorded the reverence it is due. The past and the future have to be reconciled in the present.

Thus far, Frizzell has been satisfied with the results. “The best compliment I’m hearing,” he says, “is not just that it looks good or looks modern. It’s that the hotel should always have felt this way.”

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